


The Art of Listening

by StrangeProseImminent



Category: Teen Titans - All Media Types
Genre: Empath, F/M, Happy Sex, Meditation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 08:37:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10532820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrangeProseImminent/pseuds/StrangeProseImminent
Summary: On a quiet night with just the two of them in the tower, Raven can hardly hear herself think against an unexpected maelstrom of Beast Boy's emotions. She seeks him out to lend an ear or get him out of the tower but instead finds a far for bizarre spectacle.





	

The first time he saw her second eyes; all his hair stood on end and his pupils dilated and hot, red adrenaline splashed over his brain. She’d hissed territorially and it sent all his humour all in a tizzy.  
Then he’d fallen through the looking glass into Nevermore and saw first-hand her vibrant inner-world. The facets which laughed at his jokes, the part that was terrified they disliked her, and the part that would break him if he didn’t step off on this trespass. That part cut right to the mammal brain, the part that made him so easily hypnotized. It was a place warmer than the reptile brain, where strength wasn’t just respected but sexy and a place where bright primary colors could mean delicious fruit or deadly poison. If man was where angel met ape, then he never had much use for the noisy angel side that worried too much about good and evil.  
The second time he saw her second eyes he saw the harlot, and there were no words

The first time she saw his second face he’d said “I’m not a man, I’m an animal” and that had sent a shiver straight to her pink. Then he’d acted like a huge jerk for a week, then he’d shed his skin.  
The second time she did not see him, but she heard him, the beast who cried “I” at the heart of the city, and from that point came a mutual recognition of sameness.

They were the Teen Titans, but Garfield had been fielded since he was a child. It took a lot of energy to mask that. He was a child soldier of Doom Patrol. No-one thought of him like that, but they’d all known it. The way they’d circumvented custody laws so he wouldn’t be taken away from them was a confession in itself.  
He was a child soldier of Doom Patrol and only Robin had recognized that off the bat. And to Robin’s credit as the student of the great detective, he’d seen fit to forget it. That was the unspoken agreement between them. Robin had brought levity to the grit of Batman, while Garfield had fought a serious war against the Brotherhood of Evil. In the Titans things got to be different. Dick had a chance to drop the levity while Garfield got to play the clown again, like when he was younger. Better a clown than…  
Go Big. That’s all he thought about back then. To be big enough, tough enough. ‘Enough’ has a way of creeping up on you if you pay too much attention to the symbols and not the world.

It was heartbreaking to see the way Mento treated him. ‘Because you didn’t follow orders’ he’d said. She’d wished with as much heart as she could risk that he would stand up. “I don’t take orders from you anymore” he could have said, but she saw in his untaken gestures his second face and why he allowed the shame.

Their enemy was Monsieur Mallah and his lover, The Brain. It shoulda coulda woulda been a joke but life was never so kind. Certain words might have been appropriate except she shared an identity with the bonobo and the starfish and the coral, so a gorilla and a floating brain in love just failed to register but another bit of trivia about the world. It didn’t make them less of a force of evil.  
“Let him make up his own mind” his pointed ears had picked that up amongst the chatter, and who it was that said it.  
She was the only one who noticed that pulling the mask over his head was admitting defeat.  
A soldier means knowing when to leave the fallen behind. A child soldier means never having the halcyon days to insulate against what that means.  
A boy, not a man, always a boy, not a man. A man had to admit this was suicide. The Doom Patrol is doomed. It went without saying. A fate worse than Suicide Squad, some ventured.

The worst part was the way he wouldn’t hear a word against them. The Doom Patrol were his family, and he would defend them to death.  
Garfield, it had been the first time she’d heard his name. There were so many jokes about Mondays and Lasagne that sprang to mind but her dominant thought had been ‘I know his truename and trueskin’

“Ugh!”

  
Raven stomped down through the tower to the subterranean gym. Robin and Starfire were on patrol duty while Cyborg was taking the T-Plane for a test flight after its latest upgrade, so it was just her and Beast Boy in the building, and it was driving her up the wall. She dismissed the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign and belted on the door.

  
“Beast Boy, open the door. Now.”

  
A full minute with no reply was the exact duration of her patience, at which she let herself in.

  
“I don’t know what your problem is but you need to-“ the frustrated-concerned-friendly spiel she’d prepared on the way down fell from thought when she saw just what Beast Boy was doing.  
He was big; he was covered in fur, the large teeth of an apex omnivore protruded past his lips. He’d shed his skin, taken up the form tentatively labelled in the Titan files as just ‘The Beast’. Yet there were no signs of rampage, the gym equipment sat clean and polished in its right positions, not even the pool had been splashed onto the tiles. Instead The Beast sat, eyes closed, surrounded by plates piled high with hot, delicious food. Meat, she realized as the scent wafted over, he was surrounded by meat.

  
“Beast…?”  
He grunted and shook his head, then looked up at her with big white eyes. Despite herself she was struck by how the thick black lines around his eyes and long, prominent lashes made him look rather … pretty. At least compared to the security footage she’d seen where it had carried itself with a perpetual snarl.

  
“Oh hey Rae. Sorry, I heard you come in but forgot to do anything about it.” It still sounded like him, yet the faint echo the walls bounced back sounded somehow older. Ancient, even.

  
“What … are you doing?”

  
He glanced around, then threw his head back and belted out a rich, booming laugh. “Oh wow, this must look like I’ve completely lost it, huh? Hahaha, quick, get Robin on the phone, Beast Boy is trying to conure Dread Lord Bolognaxas from the Meat Dimension.” He threw his cedar arms up and went ‘fwooosh’, what she supposed was meant to sound like a summoning. “You never come to the gym unless it’s a sparring day. I didn’t expect you to leave your room at all unless Robin called something in.”  
“I hadn’t planned on it,” she frowned and came closer, “but you were … feeling.”

  
He cocked his head in bemusement. “You mean emotions? If it’s your empathy, wouldn’t there be less noise when I’m the only other one here?”

  
“Beast Boy I was all the way up in my insulated room and I could feel your emotions like you were inside me. I-“ her heart skipped a beat at the unintended innuendo, but she brushed it off with a cough. “It felt like you were tearing yourself apart over something. I can’t meditate like this.”

  
He looked at her like she’d just said the Earth was a cube, then his face broke out in what was probably supposed to be a disarming grin. “No way, I’m fine, I’m just down here working on my appetite.”

  
She glanced back at the platters of fresh-cooked meat. “You’re a vegetarian.”

  
“Yeah, by choice. Half the things I turn into aren’t.”

  
A few pieces fell into place. “So you’re … training yourself to resist hunger?”

  
“Not resist it. I really wanna eat meat right now, and that’s okay. Normally I just settle for staring at a ham sandwich, but since it’s such a quiet night, well I thought I’d go all-out, play on hard mode for a bit.”

  
“Okay, I think I get it. It’s like … spending time in a sauna to prepare for a trip to a volcano.”

  
“Exactly,” he grinned. “You can’t force the volcano to stop being hot, but you can get yourself used to being too hot so it doesn’t mess your head and make you do something stupid.”

  
“You’re worried you might take a bite out of someone in the heat of battle.”

  
He cocked an eyebrow and offered a strained smile, “maybe. Or one of the bad guys. Or maybe just something stupid like get distracted in a battle for three seconds because I smelled a fat duck in a pond. It’s not like it’s an actual problem, I just like to test myself. It’s the moments of hesitation that really get you. Take Robin, he can do that crazy rooftop to rooftop thing because he knows the furthest he’s ever jumped and knows the gap between buildings is less than that, right? So doing stuff like this helped me keep my cool when turning into a shark or a T Rex or whatever.”

  
“Helped? As in past tense?”

  
“Well I already feel it, that I can do it I mean. I stopped making myself fret over those things a long time ago. Now it’s just a game I play with myself.”

  
“I suppose there are worse ways to play with yourself,” she coughed. “Why … that form though? Why The Beast?”

  
“The Beast?” He glanced himself up and down. “That’s what you guys call this?” His guffaw made her feet tingle.

  
“What do you call it?”

  
He flashed a grin “Big Enough. Or just big me, sometimes Dire Garfield. Y’know, like Dire Wolves in DnD.”

  
“Yes, I know DnD,” she hesitated at Beast Boy’s surprise, then sighed. “I have one of the books in my library,” she pulled her hood over her head and mumbled “It was an Italian translation, and I mistook ‘The Monster Manual of Gygax’ as a legitimate tome of lore.”

  
She expected him to howl with laughter, but instead he just smiled sweetly. Or at least, as sweetly as a ten foot green juggernaut can.

  
“When I was first living with Doom Patrol, I didn’t realize that pork, bacon, and ham all came from the same animal.”

  
A giggle started in her chest, but that was at once swept away by a roaring avalanche of nostalgia mirth and melancholy. She fell to her knees with an ugly sob and the floor cracked from a bucket of dark energy that fell out from her. Beast Boy was at her side at once and pulled her into a remarkably gentle embrace.

  
“Rae, Rae, shhh, what’s wrong?”

  
“You,” she hit his flank with her fist. “I’m drowning in your stupid emotions. It’s like I keep living through your entire live story again and again but there are no words or images or events, just emotions. It’s been on and off for hours now.”

  
“Okay.”

  
“No, it’s not okay. What about any of this is okay?” She demanded, tears in her eyes.

  
“For an empath you can be really out of touch with your empathy,” he mused.

  
“I hate this. Even your concern right now is so warm and stupid I feel like I’m going out of my mind.”

  
There was quiet for a while then “I think,” Beast Boy began, “that ‘I didn’t mean to’ is one of the worst phrases you can teach a kid.” He turned her around and sat cross-legged, pulling Raven into his lap. It was like sitting in a huge fuzzy beanbag. “It teaches kids the wrong idea about self-control, to see their emotions as some kind of other force than will brainwash them into hurting people.”

  
Raven frowned. ‘I didn’t mean to’, that’s what she’d said when she’d lost her temper against Doctor Light, when she’d dragged him kicking and screaming and begging for mercy into her dark dimensions to mete out his punishment.

  
“Things are a bit more literal in my case,” she scoffed, “you’ve seen Nevermore.”

  
“Nevermore is just a bunch of symbols, no offense.” He took a deep, guttural breath and continued, “There’s something Rita told me as a kid. An apology is made up of three parts; this is how I believe that I’ve hurt you, I understand that the fault was mine, and I promise that I will do better in the future. The first part is to double-check you’re apologising for the right reasons. The second part is accepting that it was your decision that caused it. The third part is to re-establish trust, because an apology from someone you can’t trust is just lip service."

  
"When you teach a kid the idea of “I didn’t mean it” well you interfere with that second part. They think that their emotions, or circumstances, or whatever are to blame. Not their own decision on how to act on that. I mean, if someone said something really mean about, I dunno, you’re mother. Would you rather hear them say ‘I didn’t meant to’, or would you rather ‘That was too far, I was over the line’.  
Like, not every apology has to be a formal apology or anything, if its some small thing like stepping on your toe or whatever then it’s just respect to go ‘I’m sorry’ rather than ‘suck it’,”

  
Raven let out an unwitting gasp

  
“Ah, Raven?”

  
She set perfectly still, almost afraidly so, and took in a deep breath before talking. “Garfield, your, ah, phallus … is wedged right between my legs.”

  
His eyes steadily widened to the size of saucers.

  
“Also, your paw has been idly playing with my breast for a while now.”

  
Without a word or alarm he very slowly extracted his oversized fingers from his chest, and waited still as a statue.  
Raven, for her part, tried to assess the situation as clinically as she could. Any attempt to climb out of his rather broad lap would involve a whole lot of rubbing and friction and embarrassment. Flying had the same issues just on a more vertical plane and would involve sticking her butt right in his face. That just left teleportation, which she saw no problem with and so she blinked away in a flash of black. Beast Boy remained where he was seated, and a few moments later she popped back into the world a few feet behind him.

  
It was more or less understood that a bunch of pubescent athletes always training and fighting would lead to ‘situations’. So for the sake of group cohesion, in a meeting with a lot of drawn out silences, they had all agreed that whenever such a situation arose it would be best for everyone to say nothing, extract themselves from the situation, and pretend it never happened. At some point the agreement had received the title ‘The Oh Jeez Protocol’, and It was thanks to the Oh Geez Protocol that Raven managed to avoid considering that she’d had a fourth option until after she was already relocated; the option of not leaving Beast Boy’s lap at all. That was a notion she regretted entertaining the second it popped into her head.

  
Raven crossed her arms over her chest, maybe a bit too tightly, and cleared her throat.  
“So anyway, what does any of that have to do with why you seem to be experiencing the emotional force of a concert on top of a funeral?”

  
“Right, that. I should have explained that first before I started waffling on about all the rest. This form isn’t just big-uh, tall, it’s intense. Its glands must be large for its size or something because even being a whale or a dinosaur is usually more muted than being this. It, well,” he chuckled sheepishly, “I was scared out of my gourd. I didn’t think I could lose control like that. I kept watching the security footage again and again; I didn’t know what I was looking for."

  
"Then one day, it just…went ‘pop’. We’d had a rough battle against Slade, I was tired, I was hungry, I was angry, I was scared, I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep. Then as I lay on my bed I started having this daydream. That whole night played out again in my head, Adonis, the chemicals, you, but I didn’t transform. I saw myself go through all of that as my regular string-bean self. You know what I saw?” A determined look filled his eyes .“I didn’t do a single god damn thing differently. I hadn’t remembered what I’d done not because I’d entered some uncontrollable berserker state, I was just stressed out of my mind and emotionally overwhelmed and high as a kite on the weird chemicals still in my system. Not only that, I saw how good this body was. Stronger, faster, sharper, and well, Big Enough. I realized what a shame it would be to have this in my repertoire and never use it.”

  
“Like the word repertoire?” She glanced at him over her shoulder.

  
“Hey,” he barked, but grinned at the jab. “So yeah, that’s pretty much it.” He stood and turned to face her. His own reflexive arousal had evidently left his mind because it now pointed straight at Raven’s face. For the sake of Oh Geez Protocol she elected not to draw attention to it this time. If he experienced everything more intensely in this form then it stands to reason that just being at rest in the same room as a familiar female would be enough to stimulate physical arousal, she rationalized.  
“One thing I don’t understand though, how have I never noticed before? I mean how have I not sensed these extreme emotions if you’ve been getting used to it in your spare time?”

  
“Coincidence?” he shrugged, “I figured being at the other end of the tower would compensate enough so it wouldn’t bother you, but its possible you’ve just always been somewhere else when I do it. Shopping with Starfire or out on patrol or whatever. I’ve only actually used it in battle once since then, and you were rather a bit occupied at the time.”

  
“Wait, you have? When?”

  
“Trigon,” he said in carefully measured tone, “Slade summoned an army of flaming demon goons and I wasn’t gonna waste a single second."

  
Raven furrowed her brow, and pictured the beast before her beating back a battalion of demons with its bare hands. Then her gaze dipped a little too low and her thoughts swam a different color.

Beast Boy didn’t register the way she gently bit her lip and kept talking, “I didn’t use it against Trigon himself though. The more I fought the more I started to feel … red. I was worried that it might be too sensitive to whatever power had changed the sky and didn’t want Trigon to brainwash me or something. Turns out I was wrong, but things turned out alright anyway. That was a different Red, not the red of hate or the red of hell but the red of blood, the primal lifestuff that, well, it turns out my powers connect me to. Or the thing that gave me powers in the first place. Either way,”

  
The tapestry of emotion cascading from his psyche shifted hue again, yellow fear and blue hope and violet affection. Raven reeled away, hand on her head, and took refuge on the bench of some weights.

  
“How can you stand it, though?” Her eyes pulsed in her skull. “These emotions, I feel so helpless and,” she lowered her voice “it makes me feel like I’m just a foolish little girl again.” She raised her head, “You’re always like this, like everything just happens and there’s no helping it.”

  
“But I am the happening,” he said as plainly as saying birds have wings. “When I’m hungry, hunger isn’t happening to me, my hunger is happening to the world no different than the way weather happens. You don’t try to push the rain back into the clouds, you find somewhere cozy and watch it drip down the windows.

  
Anger flashed across her eyes and he recognized he was treading on delicate ground. ‘you just don’t get what it’s like’ hung unspoken between them. Beast Boy flexed his back and licked his teeth.

  
“Hey, would you like to meditate with me?”

  
“Since when did you meditate?” she scoffed.

  
“Funny story. Back when I was with Doom Patrol, they had this run-in with a guru. Yara … Yaramashi Rama Togi, that’s what his name was. So Cliff came home one day talking about how he’d found love for all things and was a pacifist now. Noone could believe so all the rest went to see him too. It was a school day though, so I missed out, and being the hip young dudeling I am I wanted to try what the others did for myself. Of course it turned out Yaramashi was just a stooge from the Brotherhood using hypnosis to mess with their heads but we didn’t know that yet, so The Chief shut me up with some of the books on spiritualism he had. Naturally, I read for a few hours until I got bored and declared to myself I was now more enlightened than my classmates and thought ‘that was that’. Then, way later, after Doom Patrol, before the Titans, I met Buddy. Animal Man. I’d ben lost and afraid on my own but he showed me how I’d been bamboozled, by a lot of things.” He walked over to the platters of meat and frowned.

  
“Actually, do you mind teleporting these to the fridge first? No sense letting them spoil.”  
Raven rolled her eyes, and shadows consumed the food.

  
“Alright, I’ll meditate with you,” she relented. “There seems to be some point you are trying to make.”

  
With a pleased murmur Beast Boy sat where he had been before. Raven floated over and levitated mid-air beside him.

  
“Okay, I’m gonna say some stuff you’ve heard before, and some stuff you probably haven’t heard before, and some stuff you’re not gonna agree with. Just, leave what you’ve learned at the door. You can pick it up again on the way out,” he chuckled.

  
“Fine,” she sighed. It would be disingenuous to dismiss him now after he’d opened up so much.

  
“Good. Now, don’t pay attention to my voice. Don’t try to follow along, don’t repeat what I say in your head, and don’t reply to what I say in your head. That might seem weird but you don’t need to do anything to hear what I’m saying. Just listen.

  
‘Well I’m already used to tuning you out anyway’

  
“Ah, now you thought something, didn’t you? And thoughts are just talking to yourself inside your own head. Don’t do that either. Just listen.”

  
‘As if I don’t still my thoughts enough already. Wait…’

  
“It’s hard, isn’t it? But that’s fine. We can’t actually stop us from talking inside out heads. It’s like trying not to think of a pink elephant.”

  
‘more like a green one, with a great big trunk. Damn it, not again.’

  
“You just creased your brow. You’re trying to force the thoughts out of you head. That’s not going to work, where are they going to go? Just listen to them, don’t reply to them, think of them as birdsong, or the sound of wind, or the ocean outside the tower. Think of my voice the same way. It’s all the same background noise. Don’t try to name them or identify them. Just listen.”

  
He breathed deeply for about forty seconds, and at his size they were rather loud breaths.

  
“You weren’t taught to have inner peace. You were taught to have inner conflict.”

  
A spark of anger flickered across her psyche

  
“That probably offended you. That’s okay. It seems like I’m insulting the people who gave you the tools to survive. Don’t try to push that feeling out of your mind, don’t ignore it just listen to it without naming it the same as you’re listening to everything else.”

  
“You were taught not to have inner peace but inner conflict, and not just regular conflict but to war against yourself and win. So that you wouldn’t hurt people whenever you got angry or upset, because you were like a child with a gun that couldn’t be taken away. That may well have been necessary to stop Trigon. I’m not judging that, but if you have inner peace then you still get angry, you still get sad, you still get happy, you still want and desire. You can’t get away from that but even wanting to get away from that is an emotionally motivated thing itself.”

  
“So many people always try to be on top of everything, but you’re a smart girl. The most stable position is always closest to the ground, to be under things. What’s the safest part of the tower? The rooftop or the basement?”

  
“I think that’s why Robin left Batman to be honest. Batman has to be on top of everything, and he was training Robin to be like him. But there’s only so much room at the top and the more people the more unstable. How many people can balance atop the same ladder before it topples over?”

  
“I think that’s also why he formed a team, y’know? To unlearn fighting for the top by surrounding himself with people who can meet him halfway. The more skilled we got the more he can surrender control and still feel safe. Notice how he doesn’t give direct orders as often as he used to? He still says what he thinks is the best course of action of course, but he doesn’t bark instructions like some drill sergeant in tight britches.”

  
She stifled a giggle at the mental image.

  
“It’s okay to laugh. Meditation isn’t serious business. People meditate because its fun, same way we dance, or listen to music. There’s no point, no goal, when I was living in Africa as a child I used to do it all the time, though it’s easier as a child because you don’t have so many words in your head. I didn’t know what any of those animal calls meant, I didn’t even know what I was doing was called meditation. I just sat and listened, and it was fun.”

  
“Sometimes I’d make noises,” he said, and he imitated a monkey’s chittering, and a bird song, and jiggled his head with his mouth open so his cheeks slapped wetly against themselves, and he yelled but not an emotional yell but like he was just seeing how long he could sustain the noise until his lungs ran out,   
and then he made a noise she was more familiar with- “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmm...Aum, the word of creation, well that’s what they say. It starts at the back of the throat and moves to the front covering the human vocal range.”

  
“Here’s another one, A~zaaar~aaaaath Me~tri~oooon Ziiii~nthoooo~s,” again expending his full lung capacity over the course of the mantra, and singing it like he was imitating instruments rather than words. “A~zaar~aaaath Me~tri~ooon Ziiii~nthooo~s A~zaar~aaaath Me~tri~ooon Ziiii~nthooo~s A~zar~aaath Me~tri~oon Ziii~nthoo~s A~zar~aaath Me~tri~oon Ziiii~nthoo~s A~zar~ath Me~tri~on Zi~nthoo~s A~zar~ath Me~tri~on Zi~ntho~s A~zar~ath Me~tri~on Zi~nthoo~s A~zar~ath Me~tri~on Zi~ntho~s Azarath Metrion Zinthos Azarath Metrion Zinthos Azarath Metrion Zinthos Azarath Metrion Zinthos” faster and faster, beyond the point where the words lost all meaning “Azarath Metrion Zinthos Azarath Metrion Zinthos Azarath Metrion Zinthos” it quickly became impossible to tell how long he’d been at it and he kept going and going and going “Azarath Metrion Zinthos Azarath Metrion Zinthos,” more and more

  
And then with a terrific long exhale, he stopped, and he breathed in, and he breathed out. And shebreathed in, and she breathed out, and she breathed in, and she breathed out. And they breathed in, and they breathed out.

  
And this continued on for a while, until Beast Boy stood up with a grunt. “Phew, my legs are getting sore. Time to stop.” He stretched his huge arms above him then bent over to rub his legs. Raven slowly opened her eyes, unable to believe how still her mind was.

  
“What…” she stumbled over her tongue like she’d forgotten how to use it, “what was that?”

  
“You never seen a Hare Krishna? Never heard a gospel choir whooping ‘Hallelujah’? Never heard an entire concert stadium sing along in unison ‘Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me’? , and I love the irony in that one.”

  
“No, its not that simple, something happened.”

  
“Buddy had this great way of putting it. He said ‘you go out of your mind and come to your senses’. Its like speeding down a highway until you run out of fuel, or counting sheep until you fall asleep. Sometimes it’s the only way to let your mind rest.”  
“How long were we … out?”

  
“Clock says about half an hour,” he shrugged

  
“No, that can’t be right. I can meditate for hours and … not …” she lowered herself to ground and stood unsteadily on her feet. The ground had been gashed all around like as though struck by a hurricane of swords, but now her powers were incredibly still. “I feel like I’m still floating. I need … I need …”

  
“That’s the trick though, you don’t,” he laughed. “You am, I are, this is now. That is that. That’s that. That. Da’at,” he laughed again. “Hey, did you that a baby’s first words aren’t da-da for daddy but da’ da’ for ’that, that’.

  
“I feel … I don’t know how I should feel.”

  
“No such thing,” he laughed again “you feel what you feel. Don’t need know-how for that. We just do it.” He bounded over, and it marvelled Raven how easily all his usually mannerisms still expressed same as always like he were in his normal form. He didn’t look ten feet tall, he just looked like himself, only … her gaze slipped a bit too far down again, to Beast Boy’s ‘that’. It was large and red and almost raw looking and large and ‘were his balls literally blue?’ and large and-

  
“Big Enough …” she murmured in a daze. A mischievous twinkle gleamed in his eye.

  
“Hey Rae, you’re red.”

  
With an off-guard ‘eek’ she covered her flushed face with her hands.

  
“No Rae,” he whispered playfully into her ear, “you’re ALL red.”

  
No, that couldn’t be true. She slowly pulled her hands away from her face. Her red hands. There could be no doubt about it because she was staring at them with four eyes.

  
She stretched out her arm in a dreamy daze. ‘This is where you panic. This is bad,’ she thought, and she listened to that thought but didn’t reply to it. She was distracted by how pretty her hands were. And her cloak, of all the colors it could be, her cloak was white.

  
She looked to Beast Boy, her heart was filled to burst with emotions and she didn’t know where to begin but when her eyes met his she read his heart and saw that he could already tell. He leaned in close, until their heads slightly touched and she could feel his breath on her lips. Then he licked her nose and with a chimpish ‘whoop’ sprung six feet away from her and grinned toothily. She replied with a flash of her own teeth and nipped at the air. Time to play.

  
She pounced with a gust of shadow but he flipped right over her and hooted his way across the bars on the ceiling. She held the power to end the world, and used it to unscrew without a scratch the bar he was reaching for. It fell and so did he, and he twisted mid-air to bounce after landing but she was already there and dragging a long, teasing nail down his back. You’re it.

  
She flew over above the pool and readied to dunk him into the water, but when he leapt at her he went wide, only to bounce of the far wall and deliver a playful slap to her rump on the rebound. He landed on the ledge of the pool but she was already waiting and only an immediate cartwheel spared him a shadowbolt to the chest. He leapt to avoid a second, but that was her trap, and she caught hold of him mid-air with her powers. She flew right up after him and slowly dragged her nails along his inner thigh, then shot off away.

  
He dropped, bounced, and gave chase. She pirouetted in mid-air but his claws managed to snag her cape. A dilemma she easily solved by letting the garment dissolve into shadows. They landed, naked and facing each other. Their unseen pupils had heavily dilated; all the better to see you dear, and loopy grins decorated their faces. Her peaked nipples tickled against the open air and her breasts trembled from the shifting of her legs. Anticipation dripped down her thighs. His nose flared and his cock drooled to behold her.

  
His desire steeped the room and she let it wash over her, reveling in the flavour that suited her palate more than she’d ever thought possible. The normal bitterness was nowhere to be found, this was something spicy.

  
They pounced again and collided halfway, tag gave way to wrestling but the game was the same. Everything was made up and the points didn’t matter. They nipped and poked and prodded and pulled in search of giggles and moans. Beast Boy yanked her along his chest and slapped a 4’4’ on her ass.

  
“You know, a bright red rump is how a baboon signals for a mate,” he joked.

  
“Demons prefer an offer of blood,” she replied and dragged her teeth against his neck.

  
“Yeah? Chlorocebus just expose themselves,” he replied “What up, here’s m’ dick,” he cupped his groin with his hands, “Females too.”

  
“Well then,” she leaned back and spread herself with her fingers, “dare you enter my magical realm?”

  
With a waggle of his eyebrows Beast Boy scooted her closer. She wrapped her thighs around his neck and the green Titan took a long, deep huff of her musk, with a shudder he then dragged his tongue along her cleft, culminating in a flick of her very excited clit. With a deep, happy sigh she rocked her hips forward for more. Message received he licked her again, then twisted up his tongue and pushed it into her eager snatch where he twisted it again this way and that.

  
“Ohhh shit, how did you do that?” she gasped. He drew his tongue back into his mouth and grinned.

  
“Let’s just say a tongue like this is well-suited for probing tight holes for tasty treats. She playfully slapped the side of his head and rolled her hips.

  
“I didn’t say stop.”

  
“Yes Ma’am,” he replied and dove back it. Raven bit her lip and clenched her eyes for as long as she could hold her breath. How the hell did he make Ma’am sound like Mistress? With an almost pained gasp she let her lungs empty again and bucked her hips in time with the growing waves of pleasure. One hand went between her thighs to tease her clit while the other went to her breast and pinched her nipple hard enough to make the dark nub pale.

  
“Keep going keep going keep going keep going fuck!” She pushed her hips forward and arched her back as far as it could go, bouncing slightly as she rode out her orgasm. That proved to me a mistake as her balance slipped from under her and she fell backwards onto Beast Boy’s bare chest. She convulsed in a fit of gasping giggles that only got worse when her green lover started snickering too.

  
She finally found something to shut herself up, thick and glistening right next to her head. Still giggling she slid her mouth onto his cock and delighted at the way his breath caught in his throat.

  
“Oh wow! They say it’s a bad sign if a girl laughs at your dick, but a girl laughing on your dick feels amazing,” he grinned, and that set her off even worse. She had to use her right hand to steady herself just to focus on the task at hand. Right when she’d nearly gotten ahold of herself a pair of big green arms shot up, and ten clawtips delicately tickled her exposed sides. The shock of it took her balance again and she unintentionally fell deeper onto his dick, which now prodded somewhere at the back of her throat where her uncontrolled laughter made an undulating massage of it. She managed to force herself back off in alarm when her gag reflex tingled, and looked over her shoulder to shoot him a mock scowl.

  
“If you don’t stop I’m going to tan your hide and use it to make a nice throw-rug,” she warned, trying to look mean but just pouting instead.

  
”Kinky. Just remember the safeword is Mufasa.”

  
Her four eyes widened in alarm as the worst laughing fit yet forced its way up her face. Nefarious energy whipped the floor around them, and she buried her face in his fuzzy crotch as tears of mirth streamed down her face. Through esoteric force of will she managed to start jerking him off with her slender hand, or maybe it’s just because the act strongly resembled banging her fist against a table in resignation. Either way it managed to be enough to push him over the edge.

  
“Rae-“ he gasped out, and thick pale ropes shot out from his dick as his laughter devolved into breathy gasps. His load arced through the air and splattered across his fuzzy face. With a tired sigh Raven turned around so she sat on his stomach and rested her face on his chest to soak up the afterglow.

  
“How the hell am I still attracted to you after that?” She whined.

  
“Force of nature baby,” he replied, “I’m a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus.”

  
She chirped merrily and shifted to rest more comfortably, focusing on catching her breath. For a while they laid there, and again just listened.

  
On an idle reflex Beast Boy’s large tongue swept around his face to scoop up the cum threatening to matte his fur. Raven’s four eyes opened wide at the sight.

  
“Gimme,” she said, and pointed into her open mouth. He obliged and pulled her in for breathy kiss, letting her slurp the cum into her own mouth. She leaned back and with a toothy grin gulped it all down. “You’re not the only one with a clever tongue.”  
“Never said you were, Rae.”

  
She slid back down, intent on resting her head against his chest again, but kept going when something wet and warm found a place between her rosy buttocks. She pushed back further, until her clit was grinding against the base of his shaft. Beast Boy proved reciprocal to the attention, as his shaft filled out again to full length, and he slowly thrust up to rub his cock against her plush derrière.

  
Raven bit her lip as her typical doubt flickered across her mind at the point of no return. A casual Tête à tête wasn’t unheard of between Titans but she’d yet to actually sleep with any of them.

  
“Should we…continue?"

  
“Why contain it?” he replied. “S’cool.”

  
“Dork,” she flicked his nipple.

  
“Nerd,” he returned the favour. She hissed in delight and the movement smeared more of herself along the base of his cock.

  
“The gym floor sucks,” she announced, frowning at their surroundings. “It still stinks like a kebab shop in here.”

  
“Are you saying you fancy a different kind of skewer?”

  
“I’m saying,” she said breathily, “let’s break my fucking bed in half.”

  
He might have blown his second load right there had the icy shadows not spirited them away to her room.

  
They emerged in her room just a bit off target and were deposited in a heap on her floor.

  
“Argh, my butt,” Beast Boy whined.

  
“I’ll take a very close look at it later,” her four eyes flashed and candlelight filled the room. “But for now,” dark forces lifted them off the ground and carried them to her spacious bed, “I wish to feel firsthand just how big ‘Big Enough’ is.”

  
“Well I aim to please.” He gripped her hips with his large paws while she lined his dick up with her hand. Together they lowered her down inch by inch until their groins met, and Raven uttered a satisfied and slightly pained sighed she normally reserved for a particularly hot bath. Black sparks filled the air as she languished under the feeling of fullness. Her hands couldn’t decide where they wanted to be as they roamed her bod and his. One hand climbed up her stomach, over her breast, and across her cheek before digging into her hair, while the other slid down her bare thigh and across his stomach to tangle into his chest fur. She had no idea what she was doing and had never felt so in control. Her hips undulated in a slow, seated dance as she allowed herself to bask in her own sexuality for the first time in remembrance.

  
Her reflection in the dress mirror caught her gaze; crimson breasts topped by dark nipples and raised aureole, four lascivious yellow eyes framed by messed-up white hair, pouty black lips, well-toned muscles rippling under her red skin thanks to years of crimefighting, and she had the cock of a magnificent savage beast buried obediently in her snug demon cunt, which wore a tuft of white pubic hair as decoration. She slowly rose to watch his length slide out of her then slammed back down with an inhuman hiss.

  
The overwhelming magnitude of her narcissistic lust at that moment would keep her up for many nights to come, but none of that had any relevance to the now. She tipped forward and sank her hands onto Beast Boy’s chest, staring at him with wide eyes wet with joy. He bucked hard into her as their rutting began in earnest.

  
“I am a sexy naked god of war,” she said in rapturous wonder.

  
“You know exactly how I feel, Rae” he replied in a throaty whisper, and she did. He was a burning violet sun of desire so intense she was experiencing exactly how turned on she was making him, and she was experiencing it towards herself the same as he was. She almost felt guilty, it was like having a threesome with herself as the third participant.

  
She was the first to come, quivering and babbling and chewing on Beast Boy’s neck in affection. He slowed down for her to catch her breath but she raked her nails down his chest hard and she could and glared at him in defiant challenge. With a hungry leer he lifted her off him entirely, and before she could protest he rose and flipped her over, her bare ass pointed right at him.

  
With a lusty groan he buried his full girth back into her cunt and redoubled his efforts. His blue scrotum slapped against her unsheathed clit and he let his full weight rest upon her back so he could growl his pleasures into her ear. Her demonic strength was more than enough to support his weight.

  
Beast Boy howled when he came, and his continued pounding as he emptied his balls into her cunt brought her to another orgasm right after, and her demonic shriek joined his in nocturnal cacophony.

  
The bed gave way a few seconds later and the pair yelped in surprise as they crashed down with the mattress. They looked at each other for a few seconds then collapsed into another giggling fit.

  
“Oh god my back,” Beast Boy groaned, and stretched out with a pop.

  
“A bed post just punched me in the tit,” Raven replied in equal parts awe and gripe, massaging the sore mammary.

  
“It’s so weird to hear you say tit,” he snickered.

  
“Tit, tit, titty tit tit” she canted in a mirthful monotone and buried his face in her chest. He nipped at her sensitive flesh until she pushed him away, then glanced around at the damage.

  
“Should we go to my room or…?”

  
“Forget about it,” she dismissed, and with a wave of her hand the shattered bedframe vanished into darkness, leaving just the mattress. “Come on,” she crawled onto it and patted the sheets besides her. “I…can feel myself coming down from whatever you did in that meditation. I…” she glanced down. “I don’t want to be alone when I go back to normal ... Alsoyou’rereallwarmandcuddlylikeagiantteddybear”

  
Beast Boy just sniffed in amusement and crawled in alongside her. They splayed their legs together and Raven held herself to his chest tightly. She tried not to let it get to her when she noticed her skin had started to fade from red back to grey. She doubted her second eyes would still be there by the time she fell asleep.

  
Taking notice of her growing melancholy, Beast Boy tried to distract her with conversation.

  
“Do you ever wonder what our kids would be like?” A jolt ran through her body as she snapped to attention, but he just laughed.

“Relax, I don’t mean planning for the future or anything. I mean the Titans in general, what sort of spawn you’d get from different pairings.”

  
“If I didn’t dislike kids so much I’d probably object to the word ‘spawn’. But yeah, who hasn’t wasted a day away playing superhero eugenics in their mind.”

  
“Right, right. Like, if Cyborg and Starfire laid and egg,”

  
“Laid an egg?”

  
“I don’t know how Tamaranean sex works.”

  
“Gar, they’re evolved from space cats.”

  
“Really? Huh, wow. I wonder if that means I can transform into one. Remind me to try it tomorrow.”

  
“Better not, the second you get the ability to turn into Starfire we’ll never be able to get you to leave your room again.”

  
“Hehe, yeah. I wonder if I could turn into Superman, then? We’d like, never lose.”

  
“Doubt it. Everyone knows Superman is an alien, but really everyone just thinks of him as ‘a human from space’. Probably you too. He doesn’t have those weird oddities Starfire has that all suddenly make sense when you think of her as a cat person. The cognitive dissonance would likely block your powers.”

  
“The what?”

  
“Forget it. What were you saying about,” she yawned and nuzzled closer, “Cyborg Starfire babies?”

  
“I don’t remember. I don’t really plan ahead when I talk.”

  
“Is that why you’re secretly some kind of zen master?”

  
“Actually, kinda.”

  
“Great, so I spent my childhood being trained wrong and it takes an idiot to notice. I feel cheated both ways.”

  
“You weren’t trained wrong. It helped stop Trigon, right?”

  
“Yeah, I guess,”

  
“Of course the real punchline I cheated tonight too.”

  
“What.”  
It was the most flat word Beast Boy had ever heard in his life. A frictionless surface would be hard pressed to be as flat as that what.

  
“Think about it. Nobody other than you would have gotten as much out of just one short session with me. It can take people years to actually ‘get it’ and feel the pop. You ah…such got overwhelmed by my own enormous contentment. I got the entire when you explained how sensitive you were to whatever I was feeling in this form.”

  
“Azar, I’m too emotionally exhausted to tell if I even care.”

  
“That’s the spirit.”

  
“Hey Gar,”

  
“Yeah?”

  
“What’s with the cherry dick and blue balls?”

  
“Oh, ah…you know how I got my powers?”

  
“You got turned into a monkey by science.”

  
“Yeah, a Clorocebus, an African Green Monkey.”

  
“So?”

  
“So it turns out they have bright red dicks, and really bright blue scrotums, and well, you know how no matter what form I take I’m always green?”

  
“Oh no.”

  
“Yep.”

  
“Your superpower is that you will always, forever, have blue balls, for the rest of your life.”

  
“If Cyborg ever finds out my entire career is over; superhero, acting, even if I went all the way back to Africa to become a King like Tawaba offered it would somehow find me there and get me dethroned.”

  
“Tawaba?”

  
“King Tawaba. First person to adopt me … out of … five. Six if you count the army of nazi gorilla gangsters.”  
“You’re making that up.”

  
“Nope. They made me their general when I bravely helped them escape their fascist masters. That was right before Galtry found me, and right after Mr Kurt and Mr Stokes killed each other.”

  
Raven groaned “Stop, you’re getting emotional on me, and that’s making me emotional, and then I’m gonna cry. Do you have any idea what its like to cry when you have four eyeballs? The tears from the top pair drip into the bottom pair.”

  
“Hehehe, okay enough about my past.”

  
“Hey Gar,”

  
“Yeah?”

  
“What are we?”

  
“Five tonnes of flax.”

  
“Okay.”

  
“Hey Rae,”

  
“Yeah?”

  
“What do you get when you cross a Beast Boy with a Raven?”

  
“What?”

  
“A shapeshifting master of darkness.”

  
“GoodNIGHT Gar.”

 

Over in Titan security room #4, Robin stared transfixed at the security tape before him. When he’d returned from patrol the system had notified him of minor but abnormal power fluctuations occurring in the training room. Oh Geez Protocol dictated he stop watching as soon as he realized where this was going, but then things got weird, then they got really weird. His finger had remained trembling just a half inch from a button for the past ten minutes. He knew he shouldn’t, it would be improper, it would be a breach of trust and respect,  
It would be a Dick move  
Decision made, he pushed the button  
“Hey Starfire, you still awake? Come to security room four. There’s something you may want to see before I delete it.

 

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

AN: A bit of research lately led me to notice how un-zen Raven tends to be. So I got inspired to make this fic.  
I make no apologies for playing fast and loose with the timeline and drawing from both the comics and cartoon. Also African Green Monkeys really do have blue scrotes, look it up. Weird, right?


End file.
